A new Columbia Engineering study indicates that the world will experience more frequent and more extreme drought and aridity than currently experienced in the coming century, exacerbated by both climate change and land-atmosphere processes.

With numerous fires raging in ecologically priceless Amazon rainforests, Rutgers University–New Brunswick Professor Laura C. Schneider can comment on current fire patterns (the number of fires and their location), linkages to tropical rain forest ecology and changes in Brazilian land use policies around deforestation.

Analyzing the full life cycle of long-term droughts and how they relate to El Niño and La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean could eventually lead to better prediction of damaging, multiyear droughts in the Southwestern U.S.

Irvine, Calif., July 1, 2019 – A catastrophic forest die-off in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range in 2015-2016 was caused by the inability of trees to reach diminishing supplies of subsurface water following years of severe drought and abnormally warm temperatures. That’s the conclusion by researchers from the University of California, Irvine and UC Merced outlined in a study published today in Nature Geoscience.

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New research led by University of Utah biologists William Anderegg, Anna Trugman and David Bowling find that some plants and trees are prolific spendthrifts in drought conditions—“spending” precious soil water to cool themselves and, in the process, making droughts more intense. The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Droughts, floods, natural disasters and other climatic shifts influenced between 3% and 20% of armed conflicts over the last century. By century’s end, one in four armed conflicts, including civil wars, will be a result of a changing climate.